More of Tunisa - North of Sousse

Here we are back at Sousse for a day on the
beach. We wandered all the way up to the point
you see in the distance and part way back before settling down on the sand. H, M, and D swam and then the boys built sand forts and had a rousing sand fight. Nice to just sit in the sun.
We found an ice cream place on the way back with Italian gelato style ice cream - the fig ice cream was to die for and real pistacio was pretty amazing too. By this time we had started to figure out how to deal with the constant barage of people trying to sell you something and had found a corner store and a few places to eat with reasonable prices, so things were looking up.
The next day we took a bus trip north to Tunis and Carthage. Sidi Bou Said was a beautiful area on a hillside where we stopped for some traditional mint tea and perused the many shops along the steep and narrow cobble streets. Here we are sitting on the steps of a home above the market in this area.

The ruins of a roman bath at Carthage were amazing. The pillar behind us has been erected recently to show the height of the original structure, which was twice the height of the standing pillar. We were walking around in the lowest level. There are broken pillars everywhere of various types of stone from different sorts of granite to marble. We could have spent much longer here, but we had other stops to make on our tour. There was a model of the original bouildings as well as an artists interpretation and these ruins would have been truely impressive even in their time. It is amazing to think that places such as this were constructed thousands of years ago. We also stopped in downtown Tunis to see the medina there and to check out the French architecture in the capital. We were also whisked through the Bardo museum full of old mosaics housed in the old palace - again, we could have spent much more time here.